Thoughts on classical music in London, on the web and beyond. By Gavin Dixon.

Thursday, 23 January 2014

BBC SO Volkov, Hodges, BBC Singers, Barbican 22 Jan 2013

Grisey:
Mégalithes

Dufourt:
On the Wings of the Morning

Boulez:
Cummings ist der Dichter

Beethoven:
Symphony No. 7

BBC
Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers

Ilan
Volkov, conductor

Nicolas
Hodges, piano

Even
by BBCSO standards, Grisey’s Mégalithes
is a whacky concert opener. The horn section sits around the front of the
podium, facing away from the audience, and the rest of the brass section is
distributed around the auditorium, providing antiphonal effects that bounce
around front to back and left to right. It’s an early work, dating from 1969,
when Grisey was still a student of Messiaen and the Paris Conservatoire. There’s
no spectralism as such here, but all of the musical preoccupations that we now
identify with that school are very much in evidence. Performance techniques are
“extended” to say the least, and the pitch content of the music is the last of
the composer’s concerns. Instead, he has the brass players create all manner of
semi-pitched and unpitched effects with their instruments. But radical as the sounds
are, the linear structure of the music is surprisingly conventional. The
antiphony is clearly discernible, with a sound effect – slapping the mouthpiece
to create a pop, say – proposed in one corner of the hall, then repeated in
another corner with some slight elaboration added. And the music builds to
climaxes through gradual crescendos and increasing weight of texture then ebbs
back to a state of repose. Compared to the structural obscurity of Grisey’s
mature work, this piece proceeds with the formal clarity of a Haydn sonata.

Next
came the Dufourt concerto, and that was whackier still. Actually, concerto is
the wrong word for this piece, which carries the title On the Wings of the Morning. It may be an extended work for piano
solo and orchestra, but it continually resists all of the gestures and rhetoric
that characterise the form. It’s a new piece, written in 2012 and this evening
receiving its UK premiere, and it is very much in the spirit of the spectralist
movement. In fact, Dufourt is responsible for the term “musique spectral”,
although he seems more like a disciple of that movement’s leaders than a trend
setter himself. The music here is all about inscrutably complex and gradually
shifting textures. The large string section rarely settles on a stable pitch,
instead moving around in tremolo glissando in a constantly shifting web of
sound. The winds are all engaged in various extended performance techniques, at
least as many as in the Grisey, although this time the resulting sounds are
usually pitched. Against all this Nicolas Hodges pounds away at the piano keys.
He’s usually half obscured by the orchestra, but that is clearly deliberate,
and only occasionally rises to the surface with some emphatic fortissimo
gesture, usually at the top of the keyboard. Despite the breadth of this work,
the piano part is surprisingly sporadic, mostly consisting of short snatches of
highly articulate music, each followed by a couple of seconds of silence before
the next begins.

Against
all the odds, the work seemed to have a nominal three movement structure, with
a quiet, slow interlude between the vast, monolithic opening and closing
sections. The performance seemed a little vulnerable here, as if the greater
scrutiny the sparse textures afforded allowed us to hear the individual players
wrestling with their obviously impossibly hard parts. No such problems for Nicolas
Hodges though; he was his usual unflappable self, sitting attentively but
relaxed at the piano, seemingly oblivious to the speed at which his hands were
moving around the keyboard and the violent extremes of sound that they were
producing. It’s a fascinating piece, and the colours and textures that make it
up are endlessly engaging, but it could do with more imaginative structuring.
The incessant tutti that makes up about the first half of the work clearly has
much going on inside it in terms of gradual evolution of texture and harmonic
colour, but when it subsides into the quiet central section, the music up to
that point is remembered as just a barrage of sound, its details lost to all
but the most attentive.

Cumming is der Dichter continued the
French modernist theme. The BBC Singers joined a reduced BBC SO and demonstrated
their unquestioned skill in this, their core repertoire. The sheer competency
of the performers, combined with Volkov’s reluctance to push the more overt
sections, made this a technically accomplished but slightly comfortable
reading. On the regular occasions that Boulez whips up a storm (albeit usually
a very brief one) in the instrumental parts, the drama seemed to be over before
it had started. The BBC Singers didn’t benefit from being brought to the
middle, rather than the back, of the stage. It meant they were deprived of the
amplifying effect of the back wall, reducing both the volume and the detail of
their contributions.

Why
tack Beethoven Seven onto the end of a concert like this? If it was intended to
get bums on seats then it failed. If, on the other hand, it was meant as a balm
for our by then much bruised ears, then perhaps it did its job. This wasn’t a
particularly distinguished performance - the symphony was no doubt at the
bottom of the list of rehearsal priorities – but it was a lot of fun. Volkov
hadn’t done much to unify the phrasing within or between sections, nor was the
balance particularly impressive, but he was clearly enjoying himself. He had a
big smile on his face throughout the first movement, and that feeling was
infectious, spreading to all the players in the orchestra. It was all a bit
rough around the edges, and there were one or two quite serious ensemble
problems, especially between the strings and winds in the development of the
first movement. It had redeeming features too, the incessant drive of the
finale was impressive, and the symphony ended well (although the first two
movements didn’t). A fun rendition, but even from the opening bars there was a
feeling that the main substance of the evening was behind us, and that the
Beethoven was not so much a grand conclusion to the performance as an
undemanding epilogue.

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Gavin Dixon is a writer, journalist, editor and blogger specialising in classical music. He writes reviews and articles for a number of publications and websites. Gavin has a PhD on the Symphonies of Alfred Schnittke and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a member of the editorial team behind the ‘Alfred Schnittke Collected Works’ edition, which recently began publication in St Petersburg. More information on Gavin’s writing activities can be found at his website: www.gavindixon.info